During his four years as an undergrad at UT-Dallas, Ross Ulbricht earned a handful of mentions on the school's website. His name appeared on a list of students at the NanoTech Institute, on a 2004 press release about students competing in an academic tournament, on a handful of research papers he co-authored while working in professor John Ferraris' physics lab.

Since last week, when federal authorities arrested the 29-year old for allegedly masterminding the online drug bazaar Silk Road, that's all disappeared. Google can still find traces of him on UTD's website, but the links are either dead or they lead to pages, like the list of NanoTech students, from which Ulbricht's name has been purged.

"The nature of the allegations at hand is severe," he wrote. "The University will not present any content that would imply or lead to an inference that the University supports unlawful behavior."

That argument's pretty thin. No reasonable person would look at the by-all-accounts innocuous references to Ulbricht on UTD's website, all made five to seven years before he is accused of criminal activity, and deduce that the university endorses the sale of illegal drugs through a libertarian global online marketplace. Nor will the school's deletions prevent anyone from discovering Ulbricht's time at UTD, which has been widely reported by now.

It's a pointless exercise, in other words, not so sinister as the Mercury implies, but puzzling nonetheless.

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Despite his criminal activity, he is an alum, While I am not proud of his behavior, I stand by his abilities, that were honed at UTD. The reality is, MIT, Stanford, UPenn, Harvard, UT, Rice and other schools considered scholarly, have wayward exes? Attempting to remove all traces of him or his notoriety, is akin to denigrating the collective intelligence of UTD grads and a terrible PR move for the school, in my opinion. With the right strategy, we could use this incident as an opportunity to showcase UTD as one of the best options to stay in North Texas to attend a university that is as worthy, as any mentioned above. Hiding and pretending isn't the way to do that and it's not what the Comets are all about.